2. after Pieter Brueghel, the Elder(ca. 1525-1569)Alpine Landscape Traversed by a Deep Valley

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Alpine Landscape Traversed by a Deep Valley

Etching and engraving, Bastelaer 9, Hollstein 6 only state, 314 x 418 mm., ex collection: J.P.M. or F.P.M. (not in Lugt). Fine, clear impression with only a few touches of dry printing in the heavily shaded areas, on laid paper with a fragmentary watermark, trimmed just outside the borderline and just into the blank plate margin at the base.
Brueghel crossed the Alps on his way to Italy in 1552 and again, two years later, on his return. The memory never left him. He brought to his drawings (with a single exception, all “Brueghel prints” were engraved by others after his drawings) a part of the world previously not known to art, based not on tradition or artistic precedent, but on nature itself. Though imaginative in execution and certainly not topographically exact depictions of particular places, his landscape prints and drawings carry the memory of his visual experience: the mountains, gorges, trees and hilltop towns so exotic to a lowlander. The print was published by Hieronymus Cock, as one of twelve large landscapes, and bears his name. Precisely who engraved it, though, is still a matter of conjecture.